CANE TOADS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 161

wilderness, which has become the stock-in-trade of conventional blue chip wildlife
documentaries, to encompass a broader human-animal ecology.
Animality and ecology in Mark Lewis's cane toads films
Were it not for Mark Lewis's distinctive documentary style, several problematic
belief systems would be at risk of being reconfirmed in the narratives of his films:
namely, the privileging of humans as separate from natural environments and
ecosystems, the superiority of native species over pests and other introduced
animals, and the perception of cane toads solely as animals to be battled and
controlled for the benefit of the environment. In both Cane Toads: An Unnatural
History and Cane Toads: The Conquest , he succeeds in representing intersecting
points of view—individual, agricultural, scientific, governmental, and even
attempts to portray the cane toad's perspective through the construction of a range
of animal-eye-view shots—extending the boundaries of wildlife and science
documentaries. Never attempting to end up at 'truth', his films instead offer a
complex mix of both animality and ecology.
The juxtaposition of different human-cane toads relationships in his films open
up a possible spectrum of taxonomies, similar to those outlined by Adrian Franklin
in his analysis of 'outside animals' in Animal Nation , from the harmless 'introduced'
to the positive 'new native' and the emotive and thoroughly derisory 'noxious pest'
(2006: 144). As illustrated in Cane Toads: The Conquest , the predicted devastation
of native wildlife in the Northern Territory has failed to follow projected ecological
models. New research by scientists like evolutionary biologist Rick Shine, who is
featured in the film, indicates that 'ecosystems are much better at dealing with the
impacts of cane toads than first indicated' (Shine, 2013). The work of Shine and
other biologists demonstrates that cane toads have caused dramatic declines in
populations of large predator species, such as Northern quolls, freshwater crocodiles
and goannas, but after the initial invasion front populated by the largest and
therefore most poisonous toads has past, predator numbers begin to climb again. 16
As Adrian Franklin argues: 'The cane toad demonstrates that animal ecologies are,
despite the certainty of environmental predictions, prone to be surprising and
changeable rather than fixed' (2006: 162).
Lewis's cane toad films are a perfect illustration of Franklin's argument for
'a cultural taxonomy of Australian animals'. As Franklin observes: 'The current
wisdom on animals has established a confused and contradictory set of boundaries
in which animals seem to suggest social and cultural flaws and fissures, anxieties and
doubts in the national make-up rather than certainties and confidence' (2006: 153).
It is this anxiety that Lewis mines in both his films. The slippery taxonomy of cane
toads is something he constantly grapples with. Between competing depictions of
cane toads as creatures to be deplored, loved and utilised for profit and the often
hilarious one-liners played for laughs, there is a deeper message about how envi-
ronmental issues are constructed out of an array of cultural and political concerns,
even though they are often masked within a discourse of pure science. But, in the